Human Rights Watch

“There are 1.5 million school-aged Syrian refugee children living in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, but approximately half of them do not have access to formal education. Host countries have taken generous steps to increase enrollment, such as offering free public education and opening afternoon “second shifts” at schools to accommodate more children. But barriers such as child labor, enrollment requirements, language difficulties, and a lack of affordable transportation are keeping children out of the classroom. Children with disabilities and secondary school age children are at particular risk. Human Rights Watch is working to ensure that all of these children can realize their right to education.”

Nowell’s Mission

“In essence, our mission is to support refugees and to get as many children as possible off the streets, away from the misery of the camps and into school. It’s easy to do nothing, but it’s not hard to do something. We are their hope.”

Moved by her initial visit to Zaatari Refugee Camp in 2014, Nowell Sukkar recalls approximately 150,000 people all trying to survive in a ‘tent city’; row after endless row of tents.

To help ensure that the children were getting the education that they desperately needed and deserved, she founded Nowell’s Mission, a non-profit organization that raises funds for education, among other necessities, for Syrian refugees in camps across Lebanon and Jordan.

Nowell continues to work tirelessly to raise funds to educate and improve the living conditions of Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon, always on the go and personally delivering funding and supplies to all of the schools that she works with. Nowell also teaches the children when she’s at camps and schools and they all look forward to her visits.

In providing the children with an education, Nowell’s Mission is preventing them from being on the streets or working instead of learning. Most camps in Middle Eastern host countries don’t have the resources to prioritize education; they simply aim to keep the inhabitants alive.

By giving children the opportunity of an education, Nowell is giving them back their childhood and ability to dream and aspire, growing up to be self-sufficient, contributing members of society. Nowell’s Mission relies on donations and the generosity of contributors to continue their work of giving uprooted refugee children the tools to build a better future for themselves.

H.appi

“The purpose of the camp is to help integrate Syrian refugees into Canadian communities, improve their literacy and English language skills and improve their overall quality of life by bettering their emotional and mental health. H.appi works to achieve these goals by providing a fun, engaging, and inclusive environment for the children through various activities that focus on the individual, the group, and the community. We also use art and drama as outlets for self-expression.”

Lebanese-Canadian Mazen El-Baba is the founder of H.appi, an organization that aims to de-stigmatize mental health issues in the Middle East and encourage those battling with them to seek help. Growing up in Lebanon, many of his friends and neighbours were Syrian.

Mazen moved to Canada with his family at a young age. A Canadian university student at the time of the Syrian Refugee Crisis, Mazen noticed that a large amount of the refugees coming into his home province of Ontario needed help. He created H.appi Camper, a completely free summer camp for Syrian refugee children that have been resettled in Canada.

In addition to traditional summer camp activities, H.appi teaches the children much-needed language skills before they start at English-speaking schools in the fall, as well as providing them with the tools they need to overcome any trauma they’ve experienced. Coming into a completely new country and environment, H.appi has become a very important resource to the children and their parents. It allows children who have spent years feeling hopeless in refugee camps to engage in a fun, worry-free environment where children can be children. H.appi relies solely on volunteers and donations to continue to run every summer.